07:
“Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” –Albert Einstein
Lately, this quote has a made a lot of sense to me. Striving for success is such an ambiguous task, but it’s fairly easy to determine whether your actions are producing a value–taking the raw elements around you and building something useful. Unfortunately, I think that this idea is largely forgotten in the States. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of innovative spirit here. Just look at all the startups out there that are attempting to produce something valuable to their users. Most of them fail, but they usually do so when they don’t produce a value. In the long run, these guys stick around when their users find them too useful to let go. As long as you consistently enrich everything you’re involved with, you needn’t worry whether you’ll succeed in the end.
Let’s hear the ‘financial engineers’ of today explain what value, exactly, they are adding to our financial system. You’d think after the subprime mortgage catastrophe, we’d be more wary of bundling a bunch of questionable investments, slicing them up and reselling them, yet that’s exactly what we’re faced with again. I’m no financial expert and I’m not going to try to explain the current problem of toxic investments. You can ask Google about that, as cleverly use this to foray into my topic-in-mind:
I’ve been learning a lot these days, among other things, about how search engine optimization works and how the people behind it think. There’s supposedly some rift between us developers and SEO people, but I’ve never been one to jump on any side of a fight. Instead I’ve decided to analyze the situation through the lens of value. Optimizing your content to be better indexed is excellent. In fact, I often go to unreasonable length to ensure my HTML adheres to proper semantics, that is, making sure any tabular data is in a table, any lists are actually lists, each section, article, item, etc is properly classified rather than just wrapping everything in a DIV. My belief is that any smart indexing agent (Google) out there ought to be able to make sense of the content and do with it accordingly.
However, there’s another face to SEO, which I wouldn’t really consider “search engine optimization” anymore than I’d consider door-to-door evangelizing “gospel reception optimization.” Optimizing your content is all well and good and if you have something that is of value to your visitors, it will naturally earn it’s place among search results. Not very far beyond that, I’d consider it nothing more than Google gaming. Of course, companies are always going to pay to get an edge on their competitors, but it becomes very problematic when there’s a potential for the game itself to benefits from the dirty play.
There’s a lot of hubbub about the poor quality of Google search results due to scrapers redistributing content (that is freely available elsewhere) with the addition of a hefty helping of ads. That’s SEO at it’s worst. These guys have done absolutely nothing to add value to the internet. They may try to argue that they’re making the content easier to find for users that are looking for it, but that’s clearly not the case when searching for a specific Apache error message returns you two identical results, one from Server Fault and one from eFreedom.
It seems like it would be child’s play for Google to allow users to ban specific sites from their results or even have a “downvote” system to denote what one is not looking for. There’s plenty of plugins and add-ons to do the job, but for me at least, modifying my web pages client side is a very dirty hack. But let’s consider Google’s stake in this situation. These scraper sites that game their search ranking are serving up, you guessed it, AdSense ads. I don’t want to be all tinfoil hat here, but there’s at least something to consider here. If they added a social ranking mechanism, they could potentially lose revenue.
So, at best, we have a search company that needs to re-think its ranking algorithm and at the very worst, we have a self-feeding search monster that takes advantage of our confidence in its ability to produce us with the content we seek. Google needs to seriously reconsider how it can best provide value to it’s users in this regard, because we can’t expect the leeches that game their rankings up to do so. It’s too easy for them to make big money just be re-appropriating free content.
14:
So, I’ve obviously missed my posting schedule by two days, but I have a good reason. I swear! I’ve been working on a startup with my friend Flip Stewart. Saturday night, my friend and I opened alpha registration for Osmoar. We’ve been working really hard on this project for our Alpha launch of January 1st. Osmoar is a social network for suggestions. Think Last.FM, but for everything. Kind of. You’ll be able to inventory your belongings, which are themselves tagged with other things, creating a free-form association hierarchy. From that, we calculate your interests. E.g., you add For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe and The Importance of being Earnest and you have indirectly expressed an interest in books, as presumably all three of those would be tagged with “Book”.
This data will give us a number of interesting ways to interpret it. We can suggest more things to you, based on the things you already have and the things people like you have, but that’s not too exciting. We’ll also be making note of activities (think status updates) that those items are involved in. From that, we can start to suggest things you might like to do based on what you already own. E.g., if you have a bike in your inventory you may receive a suggestion to ride Critical Mass around the last Friday of the month. That’s a pretty basic suggestion, but as we’ve seen in any user-driven site, everything ends up getting thought of. Having specific combinations of items will garner you different suggestions, and hopefully users will be trying new things they never thought to do.
This gets even more interesting when you throw geo-location location in there. This opens up the possibility for users to create specific events. E.g., the Halloween Critical Mass in Atlanta. Then users who have a bike in their inventory (and maybe a costume!) and have indicated they are in Atlanta via status update, or any other feature that updates their location may get a suggestion that they attend.
The previous example is one angle to vie the ‘associator engine’ at work. A very broad usage. However, we’re hoping to produce very personalized content. Another user might have a very niche interest in our network: recipes. One could post a recipe as a note, tagging all the necessary ingredients, as well as ethnicity, “spicy”, etc. Then, if another user were to have a similar interest in the site and were to inventory the contents of their pantry, and amongst the things in it are the ingredients to the first user’s recipe, they may receive a suggestion for it.
Anyway, I’ve got lots of work to do in order to keep caught up with work and this project, so I must wrap this post up. If my quick description sounded interesting, go register and invite a friend, follow us on Twitter, and check out our Facebook. I appreciate it.
06:
Comic from xkcd
Anyone who has ever spent their time trying to come up with a business idea has definitely run into this before. You have a genius invention–pure inspiration! A quick Google search later, and you find that someone else already had this idea and is making millions. It doesn’t seem quite fair. You didn’t copy their idea. You came up with it on your own, yet you don’t get to cash in on it.
Elisha Gray got the raw end of the deal when he invented the telephone independent of Alexander Graham Bell, who ultimately won the rights to it. There’s a lot of controversy in this case, concerning who actually invented it first versus who filed for a patent first (Bell). Whatever the case, Bell got exclusive rights to what Gray felt he had equally created. This is a famous case, but I’ve been there too. Once, right after I got done detailing my awesome invention of a wireless router which made it possible for any connected device to stream music to your home entertainment system, my friend said, “You mean an AirPort?” Wow. Time to use Apple hardware, huh?
It’s kind of disheartening to feel that your great idea has already been done, and that you’ll never get the chance to realize your inspiration, but that’s only if you consider your inspiration to be a random occurrence–an idea as a drifting chunk of information that just happened upon your brain. If you do that, you’re robbing yourself of a lot of credit. Your idea was the result of your diligence of thought. The odd dummy might occasionally have a eureka moment and make something that’s wildly successful, but usually, great ideas come from lots of hard work.
Someone else creating something doesn’t limit the possibilities of great inventions you could make. Each invention broadens them. The invention of residential electricity (for more inventor controversy, see Nikola Tesla) might have swept someone’s great idea right out from under them, but it also opened up the floodgates for the invention of home appliances, air conditioning, personal computers, the list goes on.
Every new invention creates the possibility of countless more inventions. In this regard, it helps to be on the cutting edge of what’s out there, and think of how you can synthesize them into the creations of tomorrow. I guess my point here is to not feel bitter when someone is already getting rich off your idea. Instead, be glad that you’re smart enough to come up with an idea that has potential for success, and then apply those brains to making something else!
P.S. For an interesting talk, check out Matt Ridley’s When Ideas Have Sex at TED.
30:
It’s that ridiculous time of the season where I’m expected to drop everything and focus all my attention upon some (mostly irrelevant) tasks. That’s right–finals. I haven’t really had time to come up with a topic for this week, but I wanted to get a little blurb out here anyway.
A friend and I have come up with a pretty exciting startup idea for a new web service. We’re in the process of fleshing out the plan and deciding if it’s worth pursuing at the moment, and I’m doing a little preliminary development for it on top of my framework. When we get the idea more solidified and moving towards a proposal I’ll start sharing some details.
Until next week!
15:
This weekend has been the first one I’ve had to myself in over two years. I finally quit my job delivering pizza and am doing web development full time. I consider this a landmark achievement in my career, as I’m finally doing the work I’ve chosen for myself and learned to do. This semester still has my schedule quite slammed, but I’ve freed a large chunk of my time and energy. Consequently, I’m now setting myself a rigid posting schedule of every Sunday. I’ve tried to set quotas for myself like at least one post per week, but without the definite time, I put it off and end up never posting. One post per week is not much, but it’s certainly doable with my schedule, and I’ll consider doing more after this semester is over.
I’ve also been thinking about the scope of this blog. I’m still trying to develop my voice, and I’m beginning to think that it will be markedly more techie than many of my peers. I’ve no experience in affiliate marketing, and I no practically nothing about writing and selling a successful book. I write code. Developing that skill and sharing it with others excites me. I also care immensely about traveling. Ergo, I’ll be carving out my niche with a combination of these. I think from now on, I won’t hesitate to include more tech-related content here. We’ll see who finds it relevant.
As my first code-related mention, a project I’ve been working on lately is on GitHub. It’s a PHP framework I call Trestle. It’s not very far along, but I’m making progress. I’m keeping it open source, and I’m hoping that it will become useful enough to use for developing some valuable tools later on. I’ve got a few ideas in mind for it.
13:
Photo by F Delventhal
Too often, I find myself stressing out over whether I’ve done things well enough. I find myself considering tiny details, and under the microscope of scrutiny, uncertainty rears its head. “Is this what my professor expects from this paper? Will I be able to support myself if I make this job decision? Can I wear this shirt with these shoes?”
I start to reason with the uncertainty, evaluating the potential outcomes of various decisions and finally make the best choice I can come up with. However, the fact that there were other choices available that I was aware of often leaves me insecure. It’s easy to get carried away following tangents involved in decisions, and before I know it, I realize that there’s just too many variables involved in any given decision to ever be 100% certain. Sometimes I begin to wish I would have just made a coin-toss decision without having pondered on the details so much, figuring that I’d probably have just as favorable an outcome.
If you’re like me, you understand how it feels to follow so many tunnels of possibility connected to one decision until you feel like there’s just too much involved to make an informed decision. However, fear not the uncertainty! My experience has show me time and again, despite the exponential uncertainty that I become aware of, I usually do make better decisions as a result of pondering the details that others might gloss over. Oddly enough they often feel more secure about their choices, but only as an effect of being less aware of the uncertainty at hand.
Think of your knowledge or informed-ness as a sphere of light surrounded by darkness. The larger the sphere grows, the more surface area contacts the darkness. Likewise, as you become more enlightened, you are more aware of the unknown. Next time you are stressing over how much you are uncertain of a subject, be comforted that you know enough to know that you don’t know so much.
25:
Humans have historically done a wonderful job of ignoring the temporary nature of all things–especially themselves. At first it may seem gloomy to be well aware that you’ll be gone a few decades from today, but really, is putting it out of your head just giving you more room for apathy today?
When you start to think of every day as a portion of one of the most precious and limited resources you have available–time in the universe as a living being–you lose all excuses not to use them to their fullest! I highly recommend anyone feeling like they may be putting off their dreams, trading them for hold-me-over entertainment and idle weekends that recharge you just enough to go back to the weekly grind, spend some time reflecting on your own temporary nature. Get in touch with your inner ephemerality. While you’re at it, consider how temporary many things are. Good friends, your grandparents, relationships. Nothing escapes temporariness (all due respect to the laws of thermodynamics, but for the most part, we’re interested in the organization matter, and not it’s continuity.) Are you cherishing every moment of them? Are you really making the most of every day?
This isn’t a new concept, but I feel that too often, it gets skewed with a”if you knew you were going to die tomorrow, what would you do” attitude that I want to be careful to avoid. If I, for one, lived every day like it was my last, they either a) would be soon enough, or b) would be wholly unfulfilling after I reflected on a few years of life. One of the best things about time (like any limited resource) is that it can be invested. This takes confidence that you have some time to work with, certainly not the sort of thing you’d do with your last day. However, a few years spent doing something you’re not particularly excited about may be well worth it when it yields you more happiness than it cost you a few years later. To quote the famous Lorem Ipsum, “Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure.”
On a personal note, I recently made a bit of a jump in my personal journey towards location independence and earning the living I want. I have a paid internship with a web development firm and I’ve cut my pizza deliver hours back to a minimal two days a week. One giant step closer to my dreams! Look forward to some stories of my past travels and maybe a few city guides in the next couple of days. I want to dissect some of my old travel journal entries and mix in some photos, so it should produce some interesting material.
Also, if you haven’t heard, Sean Ogle finally released his Overcoming the Fear of Uncertainty this week. I purchased a subscription, but haven’t dug into it yet. I’ll be doing so right away, and I’ll give my review soon.
30:
The Carry On Life is a lifestyle vision that I have for myself. It emphasizes mobility, minimalism and an overall lightness of being. The idea came from my first experience traveling abroad immediately after high school. I left for Barcelona with only a carry on bag with the intention to travel lightly. While doing so I encountered a state of being that I can only liken to sense of enlightenment. I was profoundly happy, free to move without worrying about all my “stuff,” tangible and otherwise, relying only on what possessions that would fit in my pack.
Unfortunately, I had no method for sustaining such a lifestyle. For a couple years afterwards, I would work overtime for most of the year, save my money scrupulously, buy a plane ticket and stretch whatever was left as far as I could backpacking. It seemed worth it at the time. The long hours of work and eating peanut butter sandwiches every day didn’t bother me in the slightest when I would consider that I had a month or two of bliss in store at the end of it.
However, reality eventually started coming to light. For one, I was no longer able to live with my parents during the saving period, and each time I came home, it was harder to find work and repeat the cycle. By 2007, the last time I came home from abroad, I realized it wouldn’t be possible for me to find a job, save up and take off again. I decided I had to get grounded, so I moved to the city, found a job and my pack started getting heavier.
For the last few years I’ve worked and accumulated more stuff and obligations under the assumption that the traveling life was something I had to give up in the process of “growing up.” I now attend school full time, have a regular set of bills, a full time job and the crushing heel of debt above me. One thing at I time, and before I knew it, I was far from traveling light. However, this summer, I decided that I didn’t have to continue this way. I’ve learned a lot, and feel that I can come up with a way to sustain my mobile lifestyle.
This is my journey. How I will tackle my debts, learn to creatively support myself on the go while building for the future, reduce the unnecessary stress and baggage I’ve accumulated and pare my life back down to size. I’ll be covering topics in personal finance, diet, living arrangements, and anything else that falls within relevance to me getting my life where I want it. I’ll be setting goals for myself and breaking them into achievable, modular chunks until I succeed. This is The Carry On Life.
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